India has witnessed phenomenal expansion of school and higher education systems during the last three decades. The expansion in the education systems has been accompanied by an emergence of multiple levels of decision-making leading to an increasing demand for data and information. Besides, educational decentralization has been increasingly seen as a development strategy. It has become the framework for planning and management of public interventions in education, including flagship programmes like the SSA, RMSA, Teacher Education, MDM, and RUSA. As the education sector grew, both the Central and State Governments realized the importance of reliable and disaggregated data for decision-making, particularly for taking allocative decisions.
An IT based initiative under the District Primary Education Project (DPEP) was implemented for the first time in India in 1995 to create a school education management information system. The school based computerized Education Management Information System (EMIS) initiated in 1995 by NUEPA (the then NIEPA1) with support from MHRD and financial assistance from UNICEF was known as the District Information System for Education (DISE2). Beginning with 42 districts in seven states (Assam, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu), the coverage of DISE was later on expanded to include 271 districts across 18 states3 with the scaling up of the DPEP.